000 grant from the Robert Real wood Johnson Foundations Healthy Kids.

‘What we do at each school depends on the needs of the community,’ she said. New activities funded simply by the foundation grant differ in each grouped community. Briscoe will address safety concerns, establish walking clubs, offer cooking classes for parents and students, and support the HIGH GRADE Breakfast Program that may provide a free and balanced breakfast to every pupil each day. At Little Elementary in the Sunnyside region, grant funds provides farmers markets to area churches on Sundays, provide parenting education classes and develop the community’s gardening program.The in-home checks also eliminate the need for healthcare workers to make several patient-monitoring visits weekly, a routine that is impractical in remote places often, Gomez-Marquez said. Mobile phones are good equipment for the project because they are common in the developing globe, where it’s cheaper to erect cell towers than kilometers of poles and wires, Gomez-Marquez said. Dr. Mario Raviglione, director of a World Health Organization plan to fight TB, called the MIT idea ‘creative.’ But he stated personal appointments must continue because systems that depend heavily on patient self-reporting have often failed. ‘I would think it’s a dangerous game to rely just on incentives,’ he said.